5 stages of being broke and best foods for each

Staring at your account balance and the calendar until your next refill is a struggle most people have gone through. At some point you have to skip some meals or sleep to pass the time, and the dreaded "I need a favour" dance.

Simple, easy and on-go meals are ideal during this time. However, not at the expense of basic nutrition.

Sometimes the stages overlap or happen in a different order. (Some may be subject to editor's experience).

Beef or whole chicken soup and potatoes. Potatoes offer a wide range of food possibilities. You can have them boiled and mashed combined with meat or cut them up to boil in chicken soup.You can fry them as chips and douse them with red sauce, or bake them with the help of a recipe. You can make an eggroll too! 

With proper storage and timely reheating, chicken soup or meat stew can last a few days. Coupled with some of your remaining grains stock and matooke katogo.

You are scraping the fridge or food stations for whatever you can make up.

Enter eggs and noodles. Like potatoes, eggs also offer a wide range of possibilities. Boiling, scrambled, omelets and sandwiches.

With an addition of fruit and vegetables, this spicy pair can be a rollercoaster of tastes! Almost enough to forget your situation.

You are probably regreting the meat or chicken soup or any 'fancy' food you had at stage one. You are also fantasising about some food you did not have eat or threw away. The chapati rolex is usually the staple for this stage.

A packet of sausages, bread, some left over (still in use) tomato sauce and mustard can last you a week. Simply steam or fry the sausage, fit it (them) in a slice of bread or ban, and spread the sauces on the pair. Throw in onions, pepper, tomatoes. You can also bake them inside a foil sheet. 

They taste great but your energy reserves are on fumes.

At this point you are aware of what you have and don't have. However, you have hope of finding something lying somewhere. You look in the areas where you usually find pleasant surprises.

The option is clear. Buy a cabbage and use that vinegar or whatever dressing you almost never use. Bite into eat like a savage or eat it with your silverware.

Hydration is key at this point. Fruits are also some of the simple buys almost anywhere.

Cooking beans is expensive, so chapati stalls are the quick fix to getting some beans to enhance with a few ingredients to personal taste. Or to bow to 'kikomando', the mixture of beans and cut-up chapati. But this is the third day you have had them and the taste of copper is sticking to your senses. That, coupled with consumption of your last rice, posho, porridge portions.

You will eat with your friends whatever they are having. When they ask for your order, the reply is "I'll have whatever you guys are having."

You start to think of budgeting better next time.